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Does picking up loot have to be so tedious?

F

FutureZombie

Banned
Recently I've become increasingly annoyed with picking up items in games. I first noticed how awful it is during Wolfenstein when I spent 80% of the game looking at the ground to make sure I got all the ammo and weapons. Now I'm playing Dragon Age and looting after a battle is such a prolonged experience. I understand developers want us to search for some items, but man, picking up items in games is so damn tedious.

Is there a solution to this? Would instantly looting anything you kill work? Are developers aware that picking up items is such a chore?
 
Wish you could just walk over it always to collect it. At least some games let you do a long press to collect it in nearby groups.
 
I hate the recent trend of 'press triangle to pick up ammo'. Especially when inevitably you have a bunch of ammo near to weapon drops, so you're slowed to a crawl as you try and get your character to the right spot to get the ammo to appear without accidentally switching your weapon to one you don't want.

It's ammo - if I don't have a full inventory, assume I want it and just bloody pick it up. Leave the button press just for weapons.
 
In some games it just should collect automatically but in games like monster hunter or dark souls, loot is pretty fucking amazing to pick up loot. Monster Hunter even has pretty satisfying pick up sounds
 
Especially hate it when you have to aim at items with right stick then let go of it and press face button to pick it up. Works with mouse, extremely tedious with controllers (looking at you Dishonored)
 
I agree. It's like in Far Cry where you have to press square to do seemingly everything!
I want to search not swap guns yet it's only half a step difference.
 
The Last of Us is the absolute worst with this, and the animation when crawling and looting is bad. One of the reasons why I can't get myself to finish the game.
 
Discovering we could disable the loot animations in Far Cry 4 was a godsend as skinning animals and collecting plants is a beating such as it was in Red Dead Redemption.
 
Monster Hunter gets this right. Press X and the character pauses, bends down and and completes an animation, a chime sounds and you have to dismiss the window explaining what it is. Also items used to collect the loot will break, which is another dialogue to dismiss. It's a great game.
Also: the animal corpse will decompose in about 10 seconds so hurry to collect! Periodically the stage freshes the plant layout so you are running towards a plant that gets erased like people did in the "Back to the Future" family photo. Hate when that happens IRL.
 
FutureZombie said:
I first noticed how awful it is during Wolfenstein when I spent 80% of the game looking at the ground to make sure I got all the ammo and weapons.
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Wolfenstein was a good game but man collecting stuff off the ground felt very finicky and annoying for some reason. It would've been nicer if you could automatically pick up ammo and weapons-to-ammo you were currently holding, instead of clicking on every single little thing you run into. That really put me off for some reason.
 
Mass Effect said:
Yeah, but then you would run into inventory/encumbrance issues in many games. Unless you can choose what to exclude? (I don't know, I don't play WoW)
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By default, I think auto looting is turned off, but you can hold down a button or change it in the options to where you can pick and choose what you want to loot or have it loot everything.
 
Filters would be better, in terms of loot level. 'Don't show anything below tier 3 loot' for example. That way you still have the junk if you want/need to sell/craft or can opt to just ignore it. Or 'only show chestpieces if equivalent or better'.
 
I'm a fussy looter, I have to do value vs weight (or space) analysis for things so I'd rather not just magically pick up all the things that were on my defeated opponent. Now if the game in question doesn't require as much care managing your inventory ( all you're grabbing is guns and bullets) I can see some being designed with more convenient loot mechanics but a lot of what I tend to play means that to be efficient you want to pick things up individually.
 
Turnstyle said:
What?!!

You just gave me back a good couple of hours of my life.
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only added that in a later patch though. can't even begin to imagine how many hours i spent skinning and looting. shout out to OP, great thread idea. i think most loot should be walk over OR button press for area looting, not counting special items or things that replace items in your inventory like weapons, etc. but ammo? cmon man, give us that at least.
 
nikos said:
The Last of Us is the absolute worst with this, and the animation when crawling and looting is bad. One of the reasons why I can't get myself to finish the game.
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At least in TLOU you can just hold down triangle and Joel will pick up everything in the vicinity at once.
 
I second Borderlands and Diablo for ease of loot handling, though Borderlands menus are overall very clunky to me.
 
This is why Mass Effect had it PERFECT! Auto-loot! I killed them, I don't care what they have on their corpse. I'm just going to junk it all back in town anyway.
 
Y2Kev said:
This is why Mass Effect had it PERFECT! Auto-loot! I killed them, I don't care what they have on their corpse. I'm just going to junk it all back in town anyway.
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Why not skip a step and have all the junk replaced with money? I feel like loot/items is an area where developers have not spent time thinking, "Can we improve this. Why is this the way it is?"
 
Ys Seven/Celceta did this pretty well. You kill the enemy, they explode into chunks, loot showers the ground and magnetically attracts itself to you within a certain radius so you can keep moving without having to stop. The radius is big enough so you don't really have to go out of your way to pick it up, but if you hit something at range, you still have to kind of go near the body to get it.
 
I couldn't wait to unlock the autoloot skill in Far Cry 4. Obviously, it doesn't help with the guys you shoot, but it's still awesome.

I don't remember it being an issue in Wolfenstein. I played on hard. Rarely ran out of ammo. Was maxed out most of the time.

I haven't played Dragon Age in ages.

The game were loot frustrates me is Rainbow Moon. I have already paid to extend my inventory and I would do it again if it wasn't so expensive.
 
This is one of my biggest pet peeves in WRPG.

Kill something, loot a bunch of things even though i have no idea what they are, then have to stop what im doing to go find a merchant because i have a limited inventory.

Drives me crazy.
 
FutureZombie said:
Why not skip a step and have all the junk replaced with money? I feel like loot/items is an area where developers have not spent time thinking, "Can we improve this. Why is this the way it is?"
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You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it never crossed their minds. This is one of those situations I had never given any thought, but then I read your OP and thought "Wow, you're absolutely right" and suddenly repressed memories of tedious looting experiences hit me thick and fast - Assassins Creed, Bioshock, Far Cry, Red Dead...

Weird.
 
Fucking entitled kids. You want the presents!? You pick them up yourselves.

Amazon already does 2 day free shipping with Prime, the next thing you're going to want is them to open your door, walk over to your recliner, hand you that bottle of soda just out of reach and give you your package.
 
Not exactly what the OP is talking about, but I almost always hate when you destroy a crate and you have to walk over every single coin that comes out - it was really bad in Skylanders.

The way Ratchet and Clank does it is muuuuch nicer (You get an upgrade in the first or second game that makes them attracted to you automatically)
 
My favourite Skyrim mod is without a doubt Auto Harvest. Even if you just tell it to pick up gold and ammo, you save so much time that is usually wasted and spend that time actually playing. It's beautiful. You can set minimum weight:value ratios and set different settings for field, containers and enemies, and you can even be a little more lore friendly and use a spell to do the auto harvesting.

I wish all games had the option for something like that.

Borderlands titles after 1 get a mention for automatically picking up ammo and money, but you still have to manually pick them up when they're in containers.
 
Elder Scrolls needs a "break down" option for loot. I love the idea that every character drops whatever armor and weapons they have equipped - always have loved that.

But the stuff worth 100g or more is usually really heavy after a dungeon run. So you're either overencumbered with 3-6g junk or if you're being more conservative and only grabbing big money stuff you might only come out with five or six things.

Doosi said:
I think a junk filter is equally as important.
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Junk should be replaced by gold. That's just bullshit.

Especially in games like Diablo where you can fill your bag up with colored items, but don't have any room for whites or greys. Just make that gold.
 
Torchlight II was pretty nice. Gold is automatically looted when walking and there are options to hide items below a specified scarcity level. I played and only saw rare and uniques the whole game. It sped things up and made character progression a breeze. I think Diablo handles loot this way too.
 
Its not so much the action of pressing a button to pick up loot its how damn much of it there is. Less frequent but more valuable drops would be my preferred route most of the time.
 
FutureZombie said:
Recently I've become increasingly annoyed with picking up items in games. I first noticed how awful it is during Wolfenstein when I spent 80% of the game looking at the ground to make sure I got all the ammo and weapons. Now I'm playing Dragon Age and looting after a battle is such a prolonged experience. I understand developers want us to search for some items, but man, picking up items in games is so damn tedious.

Is there a solution to this? Would instantly looting anything you kill work? Are developers aware that picking up items is such a chore?
Click to expand...

I just finished the part in DA Inquisition where you have to collect 5 red shards to proceed to a boss fight. I missed one of the loot piles containing a shard and had to spend 30 mins retracing the entire area map to find it... They should at least do auto looting for key items and money. No one is going to say "You know what, I don't think I want those 104 gold coins"
 
Phat Michael said:
I think Diablo 3 does it really well. The color coding etc.
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Diablo 3 does it well because:

1) You can instantly see where all the loot is, and snap-judge it's value, without having to search or move to it.

2) It makes loot so rewarding, and the appearance of loot so visually satisfying (exploding out of enemies and chests), that looting is pretty much the most enjoyable aspect of the game.

Dragon Age Inquisition by comparison makes loot incredibly difficult to find (hit the search button every 5 seconds, listen for a "ding", check minimap to see where it is), and for the most part incredibly underwhelming in value and worth.
 
I must be old school or something. When a game auto loots so you don't really have to push a button or do anything, it feels wrong to me. It makes the loot feel less important.
 
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